All the great things of life are swiftly done, Creation, death, and love the double gate. However much we dawdle in the sun We have to hurry at the touch of Fate.
What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt Held in cohesion by unresting cells, Which work they know not why, which never halt, Myself unwitting where their Master dwells?
The Thames is a wretched river after the Mersey and the ships are not like Liverpool ships and the docks are barren of beauty ... it is a beastly hole after Liverpool; for Liverpool is the town of my heart and I would rather sail a mudflat there than command a clipper out of London
Each one could be a Jesus mild,
Each one has been a little child,
A little child with laughing look,
A lovely white unwritten book;
A book that God will take, my friend,
As each goes out at journey's end.
God dropped a spark down into everyone, And if we find and fan it to a blaze, It'll spring up and glow, like--like the sun, And light the wandering out of stony ways.
I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.
Lord, give to me who are old and rougher
The things that little children suffer,
And let keep bright and undefiled
The young years of the little child.
State are not made, nor patched; they grow;
Grow slow through centuries of pain,
And grow correctly in the main;
But only grow by certain laws,
Of certain bits in certain jaws.
So shall I fight, so shall I tread,
In this long war beneath the stars;
So shall a glory wreathe my head,
So shall I faint and show the scars,
Until this case, this clogging mould,
Be smithied all to kingly gold.